In today's aquaculture industry, consistent production is a subject that is coming increasingly to the fore. That comes as no surprise considering the enormous investment in equipment. As production costs increase at many stages, and new and more advanced equipment finds its way onto fish farms, the question arises: can you expect farm management to have the knowledge, time and resources needed to keep an eye on regular and preventive maintenance?
Service is a given
Historically, service has not always been the top priority for fish farmers. This is probably due to several factors, but the most obvious is that there are already so many aspects to fish farming. What follows is that the equipment best cared-for is the kind that the personnel know and are interested in – for instance as boats. Other equipment often receives far less attention, even though it may have (and to a much greater extent!) a direct impact on operating costs and profit.
We believe that knowledge is the key to avoiding downtime. Even if you choose to let equipment vendors deal with most service and maintenance, you should at least know the basics about the use, service, and maintenance of your equipment and be able to perform daily maintenance. In response to increasingly complicated machinery, AKVA group is experiencing increasing demand for service visits from our technicians. Personalized service from competent, experienced technicians ensures that every need is covered, and is an effective means of preventing downtime.
AKVA group service stations i Norway
Planning for everyone
Like in most areas, careful planning is key to successful servicing. The sooner your service provider is involved in planned downtime, the less you risk that maintenance work and replacements will affect the running of your fish farm.
We recommend all our customers to contact us as soon as they know a harvesting date or any other suitable period for service work. This will facilitate planning, increase predictability, and reduce costs for everyone. As soon as we have entered the date into the system, it is our responsibility to check with you that everything is on schedule and to ensure that our service visit is scheduled early in the period with no fish in the pen. We do so to allow for unforeseen incidents. For example, when we need to order new parts, and they have a long delivery time. Discovering this early in the planned downtime period give us sufficient time to cope.
Another benefit of adding service visits to planned downtime periods is that technicians can work more efficiently than when they have to do maintenance on running equipment. Nevertheless, our technicians will always be able to adapt to local needs and conditions in close dialogue with the customer.
Unfortunately, we often find that service is ordered in response to an urgent need and usually after both daily and preventive maintenance have been neglected. In such cases, the risk of downtime is high, with reduced growth and compromised fish welfare as a result.
Service agreement makes room for maneuver
We believe that regular maintenance will always pay off in the long run. Whether it is performed by thoroughly trained operators at the location, or by specialized technicians from the supplier, is up to you. Given the enormous value of the product evolving on fish farms and the possible economic loss from downtime, we will always advise you to establish close cooperation with your supplier. By entering into a service agreement, this becomes the responsibility for your supplier, and you can focus entirely on value creation.
Please feel free to contact AKVA group for questions about support, service, and maintenance of your AKVA group equipment.
{{cta('7458c645-5101-46e2-b140-7e9bb597a3de','justifycenter')}}